Will CATCO success with LAST SMOKER ensure a hit New York run?

Sunday

Oct 31, 2010 at 12:01 AMOct 31, 2010 at 9:49 AM

(Caption: John Bolton as Ernie, Katy Blake as Pam in CATCO's world premiere of the musical The Last Smoker in America Credit: Dave Alkire)

Central Ohio theatergoers can congratulate and thank CATCO for launching its season with some extra excitement. It's not every day, or every year, that we get to see a new rock musical in Columbus created by tested and well-regarded New York pros. Yet, the popularity of The Last Smoker in America at the Columbus box office, while great for CATCO's bottom line, doesn't ensure that the off-Broadway-bound show will be a hit if and when it opens in New York.

(Caption: John Bolton as Ernie, Katy Blake as Pam in CATCO's world premiere of the musical The Last Smoker in America Credit: Dave Alkire)

Central Ohio theatergoers can congratulate and thank CATCO for launching its season with some extra excitement. It's not every day, or every year, that we get to see a new rock musical in Columbus created by tested and well-regarded New York pros. Yet, the popularity of The Last Smoker in America at the Columbus box office, while great for CATCO's bottom line, doesn't ensure that the off-Broadway-bound show will be a hit if and when it opens in New York.

The casting, the acting, the staging, the design and the direction were all terrific in Columbus - and at a noticeably higher level than quite a few central Ohio productions even at CATCO, the area's premier professional theater. Those factors helped make the show a fun experience for central Ohio theatergoers. Yet, none of that counts for much in New York, where such professionalism is taken for granted as a minimum to be expected on or off Broadway.

The problem with the musical lies deeper. The score is weak, the story lacks sufficient wit or genuine emotion and such core issues raise questions about the very concept of the show.

Presumably, the show's New York-savvy creators and producer will take into account the audience reaction at CATCO as they try to identify what worked and what didn't - and hopefully, try to as the saying goes "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative."

But at this late date in the multi-year evolution of The Last Smoker in America, I sadly have to wonder whether it is salvageable. A solid staging of a weak show only paradoxically highlights those weaknesses by putting them into stark relief. You want to laugh much more than you do, but much of the script and score only generates intermittent smiles that start to fade even before the relatively brisk one-act musical ends.

As I mentioned in my review (also posted here on Theater Talk some weeks ago), some individual songs and scenes work. But not enough.

A key problem lies at the very center of the premise: Was it wise to choose smoking as the issue on which to set up a satirical musical about standing up for your American rights? You can't have characters to really care about when they're making such self-destructive choices - even if they have a "right to light up" and are fighting for that right. Apparently, author Bill Russell wants to explore the double-edged nature of that situation. And he does show the downside of people using freedom for their own selfish, immature and self-destructive ends. But that also undercuts the audience's desire to root for the characters. Or failing that, just one character. That's hard to do.

Satire, notoriously defined on Broadway as that which closes on Saturday night, is a tricky genre. Urinetown the Musical, a musical that succeeded in transferring from off-Broadway to Broadway and one that the creative team behind Last Smoker has referred to as a model or benchmark of comparison in interviews, works because you actually do care about some of the characters. Plus, Urinetown has some really tuneful and catchy songs. Plus, it has some really funny lines and scenes - including several that are truly clever and surprising.

Last Smoker doesn't have much of any of that. Too much of it feels schematic, full of forced jollity and cartoonish exaggeration to make a funny point. That's different from actually being funny.

Sure, the show could be tightened further. As a 90-minute one-act, it's likely an improvement over the two-act version that ran in a limited workshop run last fall at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. But cutting the show down would only avoid belaboring and highlighting the show's weaknesses without actually eliminating them.

I'd love to be surprised and discover that the show has been reworked enough to become an off-Broadway hit next year. But the creators might be wise to rethink their assumptions once more before taking the show to New York.

Over my career, I've visited New York annually (on average) to cover theater for The Dispatch. I've seen countless hits and more flops than I care to recall. You can smell a hit - and you can smell a flop. Despite its polish and peppy performances, which helped make it a hit in Columbus, The Last Smoker in America just doesn't smell like a New York hit-in-the-making in its present form.

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